1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a presence-based interactive communications system, and in particular, to providing hotline and preemption features for real-time, interactive communication sessions.
2. Description of Related Art
Presence-based interactive communication services facilitate more efficient and effective communication sessions by enabling callees (presentities) to publish, in real time, their presence information (such as, the availability, activity, local time, location, current status of the active devices/applications, etc.) and their preference information (e.g., device preferences) to callers (presence watchers). The presence and preference information improves the efficiency of establishing real-time voice, text and multi-media communication sessions, such as “Click-to-Talk” for real-time voice, “Click-to-Text” for real-time text, “Click-to-MM” for real-time multi-media (video+) and “Click-to-Conferencing” for real-time conferencing with a particular real-time media type (e.g., voice, text or multi-media).
Presence systems typically incorporate a presence server to manage the presence and preference information for a plurality of presentities. Presence servers automatically receive updated presence information from various presence sources, such as calendar/scheduler applications, telephone applications or instant messaging applications. The presence server collects this presence information from the presence sources, and aggregates the presence information to reflect the presence status of the presentities, which can then be provided to watchers of the presentities to assist the watchers in establishing real-time communication sessions with the presentities.
For example, when a presentity initiates or receives a voice call on his or her desktop phone, the presence server is notified and changes the presence status of the presentity to “On the Phone.” If the presentity does not have another voice channel (e.g., another line or another device, such as a cell phone) available for a voice communication session, a watcher will be unable to establish a real-time voice communication session with the presentity. If the watcher is an important watcher, such as the presentity's boss or a customer, or if the communication session is urgent, the failure of that communication session may be undesirable, or even detrimental, to the presentity.
However, in current presence systems, the presentity is not able to prioritize the importance of watchers or communication sessions according to different priority levels. For example, depending upon the importance of the watcher to the presentity, or the category of the watcher, the presentity may want to allow the watcher to preempt an ongoing communication session with the presentity. As used herein, the term “preempt” refers to the watcher's ability to disrupt (or terminate) the ongoing real-time communication session and establish a new communication session with the presentity.
In addition, preemption features are particularly important in government and military applications, where “hotlines” are commonly used to guarantee an immediate direct connection between two parties. Moreover, preemption features are necessary to ensure that emergency or otherwise urgent communication sessions are immediately routed to the proper media channel via which the presentity can be reached. However, current presence systems do not provide preemption features that allow a presentity to assign different priority levels to different watchers, different media types or different types of communication sessions. Therefore, what is needed is a communication system capable of providing preemption features for real-time, interactive communication sessions.